When I think of Noble / Gas Quarterly, I think of literature that is electric, that burns and flares (and from whose flame I can determine approximate mineral content), I think of circuits and currents and sources of resistance and power therein. I’m looking for work which is aware of its place in the world, for towering thunderheads and their static charge, for tension or beauty or even work which resists these ideas.

I care about authorial responsibility, about the machinations of inventiveness and also craft. I grew up going with my dad to the St. Louis Science Museum, a veritable playground of scientific principles demonstrated through pulleys, fulcrums, and levers, where conductivity could be demonstrated by holding hands, where rooms spontaneously grew smaller through perspective alone. I was a pretty nerdy kid, obsessed with rocks, and mythology, antiquity and classics, cause and effect, what magic can be made with the most basic of materials. And in the end, I think of the elements of each of our specific and valuable lives and experiences, how they could compose our own bodies as well as those which birth stars, how our memories are only signals along synapses repeated, and how the chemistry of our daily experience keeps us speeding along in the perpetual motion of our desires.

In the end, I’m looking for the best of what you will send to me, and I look forward to reading it, and connecting to you across any ocean.

– Kenzie Allen

Submissions must relate to the category’s theme in some way. Submissions must also follow regular Noble / Gas Quarterly submissions guidelines which can be found here: http://noblegas.org/submissions/

Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin. She graduated from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where she was the recipient of Hopwood Awards in poetry and non-fiction, and she has been awarded an Emerging Writer fellowship to Aspen Summer Words and the Littoral Press Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Iowa Review, Drunken Boat, SOFTBLOW, Day One, Apogee, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and she is the managing editor of the Anthropoid collective. She lives in Norway, and on her tribe’s reservation in Green Bay.